Tuesday, June 6, 2017

The embarrassing Intercept

Yesterday
The Intercept
published a
leaked five page NSA analysis about alleged
Russian interference in the 2016 U.S.
elections. Its reporting outed the leaker of
the NSA documents. That person, R.L. Winner,
has now
been arrested
and is likely to be jailed for years if not
for the rest of her life.

Intercepted source - R.L. Winner

FBI
search (pdf)
and
arrest warrant
(pdf) applications unveil irresponsible
behavior by the Intercept's
reporters and editors which neglected all
operational security trade-craft that might
have prevented the revealing of the source.
It leaves one scratching the head if this
was intentional or just sheer incompetence.
Either way - the incident confirms what
skeptics had long determined:
The Intercept is not a trustworthy
outlet for leaking state secrets of public
interests.
The Intercept
was created
to privatize the National Security Agency
documents
leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The
documents proved that the NSA is hacking and
copying nearly all electronic communication
on this planet, that it was breaking laws
that prohibited spying on U.S. citizen and
that it sabotages on a large scale various
kinds of commercial electronic equipment.
Snowden gave copies of the NSA documents to
a small number of journalists. One of them
was Glenn Greenwald who now works at The
Intercept. Only some 5% of the pages
Snowden allegedly acquired and gave to
reporters have been published. We have no
idea what the unpublished pages would
provide.
The Intercept,
a subdivision of First Look Media, was
founded by Pierre Omidyar, a major owner of
the auctioning site eBay and its PayPal
banking division. Omidyar is a billionaire
and "philanthropist" who's (tax avoiding)
Omidyar Network
foundation is "investing" for "returns". Its
microcredit project for farmers in India, in
cooperation with people from the fascists
RSS party,
ended in an
epidemic of suicides when the farmers were
unable to pay back. The Omidyar Network also
funded (fascist) regime change groups in
Ukraine in cooperation with USAID. Omidyar
had
cozy relations
with the Obama White House. Some of the held
back NSA documents likely
implicate
Omidyar's PayPal.
The Intercept
was funded with some $50 million from
Omidyar. It
first hires
were Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura
Poitras - all involved in publishing the
Snowden papers and other leaks. Its first
piece was based on documents from the leaked
the NSA stack. It has since published on
this or that but not in a regular media
way. The Intercept pieces are
usually heavily editorialized and tend to
have a mainstream "liberal" to libertarian
slant. Some were highly partisan
anti-Syrian/pro-regime change propaganda.
The website seems
to have no regular publishing schedule at
all. Between one and five piece per day get
pushed out, only few of them make public
waves. Some of its later prominent hires
(Ken Silverstein, Matt Taibbi) soon left and
alleged
that the place was run in a chaotic
atmosphere and with improper and highly
politicized editing. Despite its rich
backing and allegedly high pay for its main
journalists (Greenwald is said to receive
between 250k and 1 million per year) the
Intercept is
begging for
reader donations.Yesterday's
published story (with bylines of four(!)
reporters)
begins:

Russian military intelligence executed a
cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting
software supplier and sent spear-phishing
emails to more than 100 local election
officials just days before last
November’s presidential election,
according to a highly classified
intelligence report obtained by The
Intercept.

The NSA
"intelligence report" the Intercept
publishes
along the piece does NOT show that "Russian
military intelligence executed a
cyberattack".

Self-hating Eliza Barclay showed up at VOX yesterday to treat the disgusting Larry Summers as someone worth listening to. Elaine had said everything that needed to be said last week with her "STFU Larry Summers"
-- but then Elaine's a strong woman and Eliza Barclay's just an
embarrassment who can almost -- almost -- handle the topic of
'reporting' on the best snacks to serve at your Super Bowl get together.

Almost.

Eliza prattles on like the fool she is in passages like this:As I wrote last week, Trump’s decision on Paris was cruel in the message it sends about how America values the environment, and how
little it now cares about the risks climate change poses to the planet.
Though the doomsayers like Summers could turn out to be wrong, many,
many experts believe it is likely to prove incredibly damaging to America’s strategic position in the world, our military’s operations, and our standing in international negotiations.

Poor little Eliza.

Somewhere in the world, the menfolk are unhappy and like the good little
servant she is, she's going to make them happy. Serve those snacks, on
your knees, serve those men, you little child.

Here's what Margaret wrote in 2015 about the 'wonderful' Paris Agreement:The agreement doesn’t even take effect until 2020. Countries have
five years to continue pumping green house gases into the atmosphere as
much as they like. In addition, the agreement is not even binding. Any
nation can decide to ignore the pledges it made in Paris without
repercussion.The means of increasing carbon production while claiming to reduce it
are numerous. India and China use semantics. They claim they will cut
“carbon intensity” which means they will use coal more efficiently, not
that they will use it less. Other countries play games because they were
allowed to use 1990 as the date to measure carbon reduction. That
doesn’t mean much for Russia because its economy collapsed in the 1990s.
Going back to the high water mark of 1990 means they can actually
increase carbon production over and above current levels.The United States and the European Union also choose dates
selectively. The United States says it will cut 2030 emissions by 26% as
compared to 2005. But emissions now are lower than 2005, so the promise
is a hollow one and the actual cut would be just 15%, assuming the U.S.
actually lives up to its promise.

Just as in Copenhagen in 2009,
the United States took a lead role in deceiving the world. Once again
Barack Obama made a personal appearance and added his usual bizarre
diatribe about American superiority. He said nothing about the United
States refusing to consider compensating poor countries for damage done
by rich countries. The final document states that “any discussion of loss and damages does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation.”

That reality escapes little Eliza -- the overgrown and underbrained child doing the bidding of her masters.

Read the whole piece and marvel over how Eliza so delicately laps the
crotch of Larry Summers. Eliza really gets off on debasing herself in
public.

No where in her nonsense does she note that Little Dick Larry (a) has no
science background, (b) faces charges of racism (for years now), (c)
was flat out sexist in his remarks on women and science and (d) had to
resign as president of Harvard in disgrace.

Debase yourself, Eliza, disgrace yourself.

Nor does she note Larry's so-called column is really a variation of the remarks he gave last week to NPR's HERE & NOW.

Nor does she ask the tough question that Elaine did: "Question, where does he rank the repeal of Glass-Steagell which removed
the protections and created the banking problems -- the ones we had to
bail out?"

Yeah, that was Larry's doing.

Poor little Eliza, she can't stand up while also going down on Larry in public.

At VOX, Eliza, still not able to breathe through her nose, spits out,
"Pulling out of Paris is also such a failure of moral leadership, he
writes, that it 'is probably our most consequential error since the Iraq
War'."

Is it our most "consequential error since the Iraq War"?

Because if it is, that means the press will ignore it, the same way they
refused, in the 2012 debates (and the coverage around it), to ask
Barack Obama about the special-ops he'd just sent back into Iraq.

The morning after the 2012 election, Ava and I wrote "Let The Fun Begin" which opened:

Lies about Iraq drove the 2008 election and they drove the 2012 election as well.

The country was transformed to the elephant in the room for 2012 that no
one could be honest about. President Barack Obama lied that he'd
'ended' the Iraq War, he misled people into believing that all US troops
had left Iraq, and he failed to inform Americans that he was
negotiating to send even more US troops into Iraq.

While the uninspiring victory speech last night blended The Hollies
"He's Not Heavy, He's My Brother" ("The road is long") with Jerry
McGuire ("You've made me a better president"), it also made clear that
the administration was on fumes even before the second term officially
begins in January.

The administration is as empty as the media. If you doubt that, September 26th, the New York Times' Tim Arango reported:

Iraq and the United States are negotiating an agreement that could
result in the return of small units of American soldiers to Iraq on
training missions. At the request of the Iraqi government, according to
General Caslen, a unit of Army Special Operations soldiers was recently
deployed to Iraq to advise on counterterrorism and help with
intelligence.

If Barack's sitting before them and he's flat out lying to the American
people, it's their job to ask. They didn't do their job. Nor did
social menace Candy Crowley who was apparently dreaming of an
all-you-can-eat buffet when Barack was babbling away before her about
how he wouldn't allow more "troops in Iraq that would tie us down." But
that's exactly what he's currently negotiating.

Maybe Candy Crowley missed the New York Times article? Maybe she spends all her time pleasuring herself to her version of porn: Cooking With Paula Deen Magazine?

That is possible.

But she was only one of the three moderators. Bob Schieffer and Jim
Lehrer also moderated. Of course, they didn't foolishly self-present as
a fact checker in the midst of the debate nor did they hit the
publicity circuit before the debate to talk about how they were going to
show how it was done.

Some are still lying.

Some are still lying and are losing loved ones who can't take the lies anymore and hurl themselves to their deaths.

I've been surprisingly kind on that topic.

Don't expect my silence on it to continue for long.

You did more than shame your mother, you appalled her.

And why wouldn't she be appalled?

The truth mattered to her.

She took part in documenting a rock god's bisexual ways -- and did so at
a time when homophobia and Anita Bryant (same diff) reigned.

Yet, you, her child, couldn't even use your power to tell the truth about an ongoing war.

P.S. I may be the only one who knows where what you're looking for is --
the thing that had you begging the police to let you in so you could
try to find. That's probably one secret -- the location -- that I'll
willingly take to my grave.

Oh, kisses for one and all.

Feel the love, feel the love.

So many liars, so many whores, so committed to keeping the human race engaged in wars.

HE thought he would be filming heroes in action and recording the
work of the good guys. But what unfolded in front of Ali Arkady’s lens
was gruesome, dark and not at all what he expected.The photojournalist was embedded deep in an elite unit of Iraqi soldiers in the fight against Islamic State.But as the brutal and bloody war intensified, the line between the good guys and the bad guys got blurry.Mr
Arkady said instead of war heroes protecting the innocent from Isalmic
State, what he witnessed instead were sickening acts of torture,
executions and abuse of suspected militants and civilians by the Iraqi
army itself.In total he compiled 400 photos and hours of videos
and audio recordings revealing what amounts to war crimes committed by
American-trained Emergency Response Division soldiers, the group
fighting against IS.